Shadowborn Queen

by G. Bailey

  The faeries guide me to the edge of a clearing which is bright from the moonlight shining down. I wave goodbye to them, even though I can’t see where they are, then I continue humming and skipping after Pitch.

  I can see him now, sitting on top of the well, and my heart soars as I race through the clearing. Once I reach the well, he lifts me onto the stone with him. It’s wide enough that the two of us can stand together without falling into the hole.

  “It’s time to make your wish,” he says, and my stomach fills with butterflies. “Are you ready to be born again?” I don’t know what he means by that; I just want the lovely shoes. I nod anyway, and Pitch smiles at me. “Then close your eyes.”

  When I do this, I hold my breath, too excited to breathe.

  My heart feels like it’s going to burst out from my chest. I feel dizzy and sick and excited.

  “Do you remember what we talked about?” Pitch asks quietly. “What do you do once you make your wish? It’s very important that you don’t forget that part.”

  “I won’t forget,” I tell him firmly, peeking through my eyelashes. “Can I say it now? Can I make my wish?”

  He giggles and lets go of my hand. “Go on, Corvina. Make your wish and make it count.”

  I let out an excited squeal, then I scrunch up my little face and think really hard because I don’t want to mess this up.

  —Hello faeries! Please, can I have the same shoes as my dolly? You know, the sparkly blue shoes with the pretty bows on the silver buckles? I would like them very much. Thank you.—

  With my wish uttered, I open my eyes. Pitch is gone just like he said he would be and I’m alone on the well. I look down into the tunnel of darkness stretching before me. A loose pebble falls away from the edge and drops into the well. It takes forever to splash through the water at the bottom, and I gulp, my palms turning sweaty against my dress.

  For my wish to come true, I need to go down there.

  Pitch said he’ll be waiting for me and that the faeries will even give me wings so that I don’t hurt myself. I’ll be just like the other children who followed the faeries into the woods and lived happily ever after. Maybe I’ll even be able to see my friends, Bella and Michael and Agnes.

  We’ll all be faeries together, like we used to talk about.

  I turn around and spread my arms out like wings, smiling at the thought of seeing my friends from school again. Taking a deep breath and holding it in my chest, I close my eyes and fall down into the well, praying that Mama and Papa were wrong about the faeries, and about Pitch, the monster hiding under my bed…

  Before I plunge to my death, I wake up with a gasp for air, clutching my thin bedsheets in my hands. Pitch wasn’t waiting for me. There was nothing but pain and misery at the bottom of that stupid well, and my innocent ass didn’t know any better back then.

  I fell into magical darkness, and as everyone here tells me, that’s when I became a shadowborn.

  But that’s not the part that haunts me every night in my dreams. Oh, no. It’s what happened after the pain and misery—after I drowned in all the magical water, my eight-year-old body absorbing it like it was sugar and I was a starving kid. When my heart started beating again and I opened my eyes, I lay floating on my back as the moon drew closer and closer to me. I remember crying and thinking I had been turned into a bug instead of a faery, but it was just the water healing my shattered bones and floating me up to the surface.

  The second my feet touched the earth again, my power exploded, and I destroyed everything in a five-mile radius, including all the houses and the people inside them.

  Including my parents.

  And the only living thing was me, covered in ash, lying on the forest floor as the sun rose into a blood-red sky.

  Talk about a birthday to remember.

  After that, I was picked up by the Shadow Wardens, protectors of the magical world, and thrown in a shadowborn foster home with all the other children that are like me. Only they didn’t kill hundreds of people and not one of them in here sees their powers like the curses really are.

  “You having those dreams again?” Sage asks, sitting up on her bed next to me and staring at me, the moonlight highlighting her beige skin and curly pink hair that isn’t at all messy even though she just woke up. Sage Millhouse is the only bit of this foster home that I've ever cared about and I'm certain it's the same way for her. We came here on the same day, two scared kids who wanted nothing more than to escape this hellhole and the new powers we have. Sage got her power the way most of the kids here did, by being bitten by a shadowborn in their animal state. One bite is enough to infuse any soul with shadow magic, and all it took for Sage was a bite from a fox in her garden.

  The fox was never seen again, and Sage nearly died, only to survive and be taken from her parents to come and live here.

  The foster home is full of those stories, and it's the main reason I don't talk about my past.

  "Always."

  It’s all I need to say for Sage to get off her bed and head out of the room. I follow her, the old wooden floorboards creaking under my bare feet with each step. Sage holds the timber door open and we head outside into the garden. The cool air is refreshing for only a second before it's nothing but cold nipping at my skin.

  "Ready?" I ask her as I stare up, the darkness and shadows comforting me like they always do.

  Sage doesn't reply, though I’m unsurprised as she isn't one for words. That’s why I like her. I watch her bright purple eyes as she disappears in a cloud of black smoke. The darkness. It’s become a blanket of sorts to people like us. As the blackness fades away, there is nothing more than a hawk sitting on the ground, its lavender eyes staring up at me. I grin as I close my own silver eyes and do the next best thing in the world.

  I let the darkness take me, creating me into something more.

  Something so much better than I already am.

  My body disappears into the darkness, but my mind always stays, loving the comfort as I shift into a raven and follow Sage into the skies of Blackpool.

  Chapter 23

  Bonus Read

  Corvina

  Chapter Two

  "We should head back," Sage suggests around a spoonful of ice cream.

  I watch the sea lap at the steps beside the shore and the sandbags lined at the top of them. The skies are grey, eerily so, like they can sense what a crap day this is going to be for us. The sea smells of salt and I can almost taste it over the bubblegum lollipop I've just finished off. Over the sounds of the waves, the seagulls make themselves known with loud squeaks, and in the distance, some children ride bikes down the front.

  "Why? I have nothing to pack and neither do you. The wardens aren't coming until nightfall," I remind her. She eyes me carefully and I try to pick up on her emotions. Is she as nervous as me? Unlikely. The Shadowborn Academy is our next home, starting from tonight. We both have known we would attend this year, on the year we turn eighteen, since we aren't classed as kids anymore. The academy is meant to teach us control and endurance, to accept our new life and fit into their society of normal magics.

  What if you don't want to fit in?

  I asked our warden that once, and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  "They might not come for us at all. Wouldn't that be nice?" she replies, and I smirk at her, leaning back on the bench. I chuck the stick of my ice lolly in the bin and go back to people watching the streets.

  I love people watching, and so does Sage. We have spent days on this bench, making up stories for random strangers we spot. Our stories are unlikely to be right, but it gives us an escape into a normal world—a world where our nightmares cannot reach us. We can almost pretend we’re just two teenagers skipping school instead of what we really are.

  "Do you think Keeper Maddox will miss us?" Sage asks, her voice dripping with humour.

  The Light Warden runs our foster home, and she’s the fourth one since I came here, as all the others quit. No
one likes looking after dozens of kids with shadow powers, and all of whom want their parents back. These poor wardens would literally prefer any other assignment in the magics world. It's depressing, but Keeper Maddox isn't the worst of the lot.

  "I doubt she will even notice us leave. She prefers the younger ones," I reply.

  They’re easier to control.

  As for me and Sage?

  We’re damaged goods and a waste of air. Or so we’ve been told by previous wardens. Sometimes late at night, when my demons catch up with me, I almost believe them.

  “And you have your book? In the name of Selena, do not forget that book, child,” Keeper Maddox warns me later that day, giving my opened trunk an assessing once over. Spotting the old, tattered book beside my trunk, she nods. “Thank the Gods. You mustn’t forget it. Always have your book with you—”

  “—from the instant you enter the forest,” I tersely interject, having endured this spiel many times before now. “The book is our bible. We get it, Miss Maddox.”

  We’ve had no choice but to.

  I’ve read the Book of Zorya a million times already. I don’t know why she’d think we’d leave here without it. It’s practically the map to our new home. A home neither of us wants to be part of.

  Well, Sage says she doesn’t, but I have a sneaky suspicion she’s excited to use magic beyond the mediocre level we were taught here. The wardens never wanted us to learn more than needed since we were supposed to be part of the mortal world.

  The mortal world.

  After ten years, it still feels odd to not be quite human anymore. I had human parents, lived in a human village, before I was…changed. Now I’m just a shadowborn, and I must go to this academy to learn the tricks of the trade. Part of me should at least feel excited, but I’m not. I’m more terrified than anything else. The last time I entered the Enchanted Forest, my whole world was taken from me.

  “Very well, then,” Maddox starts, gesturing to my trunk. “Your luggage should arrive at the academy by the time you arrive. Why don’t you go stand outside with the others?”

  She leaves without waiting for a reply.

  I look out the window above what used to be my rickety bed. Sage is sitting on her tire swing in the back garden, looking down at Little Nessa’s grave. She was a kid who used to stay here before she lost control of her power. Sage and I shared a room with her, and we always managed to calm her down when she had nightmares. But that night we went out for a fly, and when we came back, they were carrying Nessa’s small body out. I remember looking at her and thinking how peaceful she looked, as if she were just sleeping. But that’s the thing with shadowborns. Our magic feeds off the darkness residing within us, and often it takes over.

  Our fears, our heartaches, our pain... anything that affects us negatively, the magic pulsing through our veins latches on to them and grows stronger with every fruitless effort we make to fight them.

  Some of us learn to control our dark sides, at least for a while. Others, like Nessa, never stand a chance from the moment they were turned into a shadowborn. This is why the academy exists: to teach magics like me how to accept our demons instead of hiding from them. Running, avoiding, suppressing, all these things merely worsen our condition. I learned that a long time ago, and I managed to accept my demons.

  The darkest one of all is named Pitch, and he’s also my shadow.

  Speaking of the devil, which he might be for all I know, Pitch doesn’t always talk to me. I guess he doesn’t really need to. His thoughts are my fears, and my fears are his thoughts now. No matter where he goes, I can always sense him without looking. It’s inherent, not because I want it to be, but because we’re soul mates.

  Literally.

  The night that I died, I was the only light left within his swirling darkness, and he latched on to me by tethering my soul to his so we could both stay alive. He never meant for either of us to suffer and die. Only a child himself, he merely wanted to grant my birthday wish.

  I never quite bought that either in the beginning. But despite all the anger and pain I felt towards him for many years later, I’ve come to accept that without him, without his darkness nestled around my heart, my soul would be incomplete. He’s a part of me whether I want him to be or not, and any time we’re apart, a gut-wrenching longing takes over me, and it burns right through to my core.

  I turn back, seeing a shadow of a figure in the corner of the room, sitting on an empty bed. Sometimes Pitch looks like a man with broad shoulders, thick black hair, and alluring amber eyes. And sometimes, like this, he is just a shadow that blinks away before I can ask why he’s even here.

  Clearing my throat, I leave and head down the corridor, my navy boots announcing every footstep in the dark, dimly lit hallway. Pushing the door open, I step out into the moonlight as Sage stands and turns to me, clutching her copy of the Book of Zorya in her hands. This is how I know she’s excited to go to the academy—she’s forever reading that damn book.

  "Is it time?" she asks, and I simply nod. Hooking her arm in mine, we leave the garden and head to the front of the house. We walk outside, sitting on the brick wall, watching the stars in the sky.

  "They say it's so dark in the enchanted forest, and unless you have the blessing of the sun and moon, you can't see where you walk," she half-jokes, but I can tell she is nervous.

  I roll my eyes at her. It can't be that bad. "You need to stop reading that book. Wait and see. We will be there soon."

  She opens her book and starts reading, ignoring me completely.

  "In the beginning, Aphrodite and Persephone decided to create a magical forest for all manner of creatures. They appeared in their natural form, unearthly beautiful and fae-like, and brought with them their favourite stars—the Morning Star and the Evening Star. They each placed them in the sky, and one became the sun and the other the moon," she reads out, her voice being carried by the wind to poor unsuspecting humans who don't want to hear a fairy tale like this.

  A fairytale that quickly became a nightmare.

  "I know, I know. Then monsters came to the forest. Blah, blah, blah," I drone, but she ignores me once more and carries on reading.

  "Aphrodite became known as Danica, Goddess of the Sun, and she created the Throne of Helios where she would reign over her part of the forest. Persephone became Selena, Goddess of the Moon, and she created the Throne of Luna, again where she would rule her half of the forest. To their kingdoms, they became known as the Zorya Sisters..." She stops, turning the page and pausing in whatever she’s reading.

  "I've heard the thrones are cursed, and that's why all the royal fae are crackers," I whisper to her. Keeper Maddox and every keeper I've met talk like fae are these holy creatures, and to speak badly about them is as forbidden as murder.

  "Rumours, all rumours, Corvina," she sighs, snapping the book shut. "Aren't you excited to see a fae student? They’re meant to be very alluring and beautiful."

  Alluring and beautiful is exactly how I would describe Pitch.

  But often those things just hide a person's true nature like a cloud of smoke.

  When I finally focus on Sage, her all too knowing eyes are watching me closely. "I know you're scared. It's okay to admit it to me, Corvina."

  "Since I became a shadowborn, I've been scared, Sage, but I've learnt that running from it only gives the fear more power. It's better to face the darkness than run from it, because one thing is for damn sure..." I pause as I see something coming down the road. "In our world, the darkness never lets you go."

  Chapter 24

  Appendix i - LOCATIONS

  (as mentioned in the book)

  Zoyra Kingdom

  THRONE OF LUNA

  Capital City: LUNA

  Ruler: Queen Narah

  DEADLANDS

  Inhabits: Cimmerians, Draugers, Deserters, Bandits

  THE BLACK HARBOUR

  THE WISHING WELL

  SKULL CAVE

  aka Howling Hollow Cave, Statue of Aeon<
br />
  THE GORGON LAKE

  FAERIE POOLS

  DEVIL’S DROP

  SHADOWBORN ACADEMY

  SHADOWBORN PRISON

  DRACONIA

  Capital City: Emeria

  Ruler: King Cyrus, Naraah’s brother

  Queen Valessia

  Prince Drusus (triplet)

  Prince Draco (triplet)

  Prince Drakon (triplet)

  Princess Kaida

  ZORYA INN

  Helios Kingdom

  THRONE OF HELIOS

  Capital City: VASILI

  Ruler: King Ulric

  Princess Evangelina

  LAKE LUMEN

  HELIOS ACADEMY

  AURORA BAY

  PEGASUS TAVERN

  FAERIE POOLS

  KYLLAROS

  Ruler: Chiron

  Prince Elias

  Appendix ii - PRISON LAYOUT

  GROUND FLOOR

  Entrance/Security

  Armories

  Processing Room